Doldrums
The past couple of weeks I’ve spent pleasantly adrift in the summer doldrums.
There’s very little interesting stuff to report. I’ve been reading, on average, four books a week. I switched to Vonage VoIP for my telephone service. The piece I wrote on Ubuntu Linux came out in print.
A client gave me a forearm-sized cucumber, so I’ve been eating more salads lately. I thought about turning that into a piece about how I really, really prefer iceburg lettuce over leaf lettuce, and how I despise the trendier varieties that are all the rage in restaurants. But jeeze, it’s just lettuce, you know?
I considered a piece about the neighbors I call The Scooter Boys and how they manage to wake me up nearly every weeknight. And not with the scooters. They’re very courteous about pushing them out to the street before starting and just coasting up the sidewalk when returning. It’s the voices under the bedroom window that wake me up. But that’s just whining.
I expended a lot of energy mentally putting together something about how my neighbor’s ex-girlfriend woke me up, out on the fire escape attempting reconciliation at 3:30 Sunday morning. The only thing worth keeping from that was a description of her voice, which is an unfortunate combination of high-pitch, nasal tone and gravel burr that comes off sounding remarkably like a circular saw being forced through a particularly uncooperative piece of hardwood. And it was just anger anyway.
CBC had a cat emergency drama that played out over a week. The full story, which involves airbags, a six-foot cat gym, a mouse, and three white women (okay, 2½ women) after dark in the heart of The Bronx, had me nearly wetting myself. But it’s not my story to tell. And you really have to know the cats and the women (okay, 2½ women) and some of the backstory.
One of the books I read really resolved a lot of the CBC issues for me. She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders a memoir by novelist Jennifer Finney Boylan.
Part of it comes from the way the book is written. Almost everything else I’ve read on the topic is dry and clinical. Those other books gave me no real sense of the people involved—what they thought, how they feel. And no sense whatsoever of the people around them.
Memoir addresses exactly those things. I could identify both with Jenny’s partner Grace, and her best friend, novelist Richard Russo. This gave me a baseline from which I could compare my own thoughts and feelings. As a mental patient and addict, I need an external baseline since my internal ones are broken, or at least not always valid. I came away feeling really good about where I am with CBC and how I’m doing with it.
Another part is that Jenny looks so much like CBC that, right there in the middle of the library I gasped and exclaimed, “Oh-my-god, oh-my-god!” And they share a lot of personality traits—not the least of which feeling the need constantly to apologize. “I’m sorry” comes out of both their mouths with amazing regularity.
That bothered be before, but with the insight gained from reading Jenny’s book, I see now that—at least for them—it’s part of the way the condition has effected them. I had been taking it as low self-esteem, when it seems instead to be linked to feeling sorry about being a boy, which seems to have gone away for Jenny and should, in time, for CBC.
In any event, it’s a great book (although perhaps not a Great Book) and I recommend it highly. Even if you have no interest in transsexualism, it’s a great story about love, friendship and relationships in times of crisis.
As far as my own mental health is concerned, I seem to have passed this August without the usual explosion of monkey-brain ADD. Feels weird and wonderful. With a hint of foreboding mixed in. It’s because of my history of whacked-out Augusts that I decided to take it easy this month and just sort of drift along. And nothing bad happened. Most unusual.
I’m also coming up on six months without any medication. I was initially quite fearful, in anticipation of shoes dropping. Now, I’m feeling hopeful. While I’m preparing for the winter blues, I’m also wondering, what if that doesn’t happen either? Or happens only in moderation?
I need to get on with my day. There’s plenty of loafing to do before work. And maybe I should defrost something for dinner.
August 31st, 2005 at 6:27 am EDT
Saw Jenny on Oprah and just fell in love with her honesty. I might try to find the book, as the excerpt was interesting. A book by Chris Bohjalian is a wonderful read Tran-sister Radio. Of course it’s fiction, but very well written, unlike this comment.
Need more coffee.
August 31st, 2005 at 2:31 pm EDT
Interestingly, CBC also saw Jenny on Oprah, and bought the book. She’s never read it though. I’m working on getting her to read it. Meanwhile, I’m rereading it already. The first time through I read it for… I guess content is close enought. This second time I’m reading it for pleasure and really enjoying it.
I’ve shelved Trans-sister Radio a number of times, but it’s never stuck to my hands during the process. Although I seem to remember reading the inside flap.